Mutant registration acts are fictional also. I think you have to look at this as if we're living in a comic book world. If mutants are real, then are mutant registration acts legal and ethical? Can you then compare them to vaccination registration acts? I don't have an answer to any of these questions. I think it's a very thorny debate.

Don't pin your hopes on teaching people what your religion believes. *Every* religion believes in wacky, nonsensical things that can be twisted around and laughed at.

Teach people that your religion *acts well*. That should be your central difference with Scientology -- the Scientologists break the law to spy on and destroy their enemies, while legitimate religions treat people fairly. Belief does not matter at all. The way a religion acts is what makes them honorable or criminal.

The problem is that in order to do that the original companies need to sell the Intellectual Property to the new owners. That won't happen cheap. Even the City of Heroes IP, which was shut down by NCSoft because it was no longer worth running the servers, could not be sold for less than ten million dollars. IP is expensive. The companies are all speculating that they might be able to make a new game with the same IP someday. With that kind of IP hoarding mentality, they will never let another company run servers for a defunct game that might someday compete with them for the same IP.

No reason to get snarky, especially when the original post is correct. There are magnetic materials in birds' eyes. However, they only register when exposed to a magnetic field under certain conditions, as a quantum phenomenon. It is an electron spin transfer that is delayed by the quantum Zeno effect to a timescale where the birds' retina can detect the difference.
It's not as simple as a compass that points them in the right direction. Birds use some seriously weird quantum tricks to see magnetic fields.

Hmn. My link didn't work, so let's try it here. This is a study on avian electromagnetic vision, with a simulation of what a bird sees when looking at the magnetic field of the Earth. http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/Researc...

I think the bigger problem is that the avian electromagnetic sense is tied to their eyesight. So the electromagnetic noise isn't just causing them to fly in the wrong direction, it's interfering with their ability to see. This may cause them to run into buildings, wind turbines, and power lines more often than usual.

It might not be that the young mice have something the old mice don't. It might be that old blood has too much debris -- malformed platelets, histamines, hormones, viruses, and rubble from collapsed cell walls. That junk could be gunking up the metabolic works in the elderly. Then you're not looking for a protein factor, you're looking for a filter, which is much more difficult to develop.

I spell it CDO, because it doesn't annoy me as much when it's in alphabetical order.

What you call 'spiral dynamics' sounds a lot like Machiavelli's theory of political history, which he laid out in his book The Prince.

Machiavelli postulated that Monarchy tends to devolve into an aristocratic and oligarchic Tyranny, Tyranny is supplanted via revolution by Democracy, Democracy eventually (and inexorably) falls into Anarchy, and Anarchy is solved when one person rises to lead the masses and forms a Monarchy.

History is cyclic. The question is whether we can break the cycle, and do we want to. As powerful as the security state has become, we're likely to break the cycle by spawning an eternal Tyranny instead of a sustainable Democracy.

Hmn. This sounds as if they are trying to prove that the essential nature of quantum mechanics is not computable. I wonder, if they framed this research another way, if it could solve the question of whether or not the universe is a simulation. (I suspect not, it might just indicate that classical and quantum objects are simulated in different ways.)

Years ago I built a computer with all the right ingredients, an SSD, a good graphics card and CPU, enough fans to aerate a 747, etc. I made one major mistake. When prompted by the Windows 7 installer whether I wanted 32 or 64 bit operating system, I chose 32. I have a lot of legacy software (most importantly an old version of Photoshop) that I was worried would not work on a 64-bit OS.

That one decision has severely limited my computer. Most noticeably, it caps my RAM at 4 GB. The SSD drive has helped by providing swap space.

How can I undo this? All I can think of is to cleanse the drive and reinstall -- a hell of a hassle.

(Don't advise me to change to Linux, I have too much Windows software on this PC. I have a separate Linux machine.)

'Content' includes many things -- storyline, enemies, zones, and *character build options*. Being able to replay the game using an entirely different strategy is a form of additional content. That's what I love most in these type of games.

PoE has that in spades, at least through the first one or two difficulty levels. (At high levels, only a few strategies are viable, which is why the game starts to get more tiresome.) It also has enough storyline lore and enemy diversity to be consistently interesting. (I disagree with your comment about PoE exiles having no backstory, by the way. Ask the Scion about her husband sometime.)

D3 has more enemies and more storyline, but there are almost no character builds to speak of. You choose a class. Every character of that class has the exact same skills, and they all do the same thing, and if there are slightly different builds it's free and easy to switch between them. That means there are reduced strategic options, which means less replayability.

I'm not complaining about online only. It just doesn't matter to me.

My crossbow was not a stat stick in D2. I marched an army of skeletons between me and the monsters, then took the monsters out with crossbow bolts. Got to level 73 that way. It was a viable weapon choice and a viable strategy. In D3 it no longer is.

The developer *claims* to have listened to criticism, and *claims* to have fixed the game.

By not purchasing the 'fix', the players are sending the message that 'We Don't Trust The Developer Anymore'.

How do they regain our trust? If things actually are fixed and the developers are actually listening, word of mouth will eventually filter down to those of us that hold a grudge. It will take time.